Artificial Intelligence From Maana Speeds Up Digital Transformation At Maersk

Does your company suffer from corporate amnesia? Palo Alto, California-based startup Maana has developed a cure for what ails organizations everywhere: Knowledge of how to perform a certain task or make a specific decision walks out the door with employees migrating to another job or retiring. Even when this tacit knowledge is captured, codified and stored in a database, it may not be accessible to the people who need it, when they need it. “We patented a unique and novel way of indexing and organizing the knowledge that is locked in data silos across the organization,” says founder and CEO Babur Ozden. Today, Maana released a new version of its AI-driven platform.

Failing organizational memory is particularly harmful when there is a “decision deadline,” explains Ozden: “These are decisions that need to take place along the workflow of an operation and need to be taken in a few hours or a few minutes.” Maana’s knowledge graph, which captures complex relations between actions, processes, and assets, coupled with advanced AI algorithms, semantic search, and deep learning, helps employees make faster and more relevant data-driven decisions by providing them with the relevant pieces of organizational memory at the moment they need it most.

Maana’s technology “captures the knowledge people acquire on the job and enables other employees, who do not have a similar experience, to have a head start in making a decision instead of starting from zero,” says Ibrahim Gokcen, Head of Data Science & Analytics at Maersk. The Maersk Group is a worldwide conglomerate that operates in 130 countries with a workforce of over 89,000 employees. Headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark, with 2015 revenues of $40.3 billion, it owns Maersk Line, the world’s largest container shipping company, and is involved in a wide range of activities in the shipping, logistics, and the oil and gas industries.

“We want to make AI part of our digital journey,” says Gokcen. “Strong technology platforms with AI capabilities help the data science and analytics people focus on the business logic, on the algorithms, and on churning models very quickly. These platforms give a head start not just to employees making decisions but also to our data scientists.”

Adds Donald Thompson, Maana’s founder and president: “We capture in a pragmatic way the knowledge of subject matter experts and business users and make it explicit so more people can take advantage of it.”

In a statement, Thompson said that the new version of Maana’s platform is “introducing our first collection of Knowledge Assistants and Knowledge Applications that really bring out the value of our user-guided and machine-assisted approach. People at all levels are empowered to rapidly gain the understanding they need in order to make the best decisions, while generating new knowledge assets (models) that others can use or build upon.”